Week 0 - The Starting Line

One day in the Mahjong discord, Dasuke posted this message:

I thought about it that night. Then all through the next day. Six hours a day would leave me with literally no free time during the week. Eight hours of work, nine hours of sleep, six hours of mahjong, and one hour for commuting and eating. Still, this was a great opportunity, wasn't it? I eventually came to a decision. When I saw Dasuke online the next day...

And so it begins. In case you're unfamiliar with Dasuke, he's a 7dan player. Recently, he moved to Japan to become a pro. People have described him as "a knowledge vacuum," "a good lad," and "probably a good teacher~". We'll see about those, but I'm feeling good so far.

With around 30 hours of Mahjong practice each week, how far can I get? This blog will act as a sort of diary for my progress. Since this is the first post, let me first go over the format these posts will follow. Each post will be structured roughly like so:

• Where I'm at now
• A link to a recent replay
• Commentary on the replay pointing out a couple mistakes I made
• What I've been working on since the last post
• How what I've been working on has affected by play

So, where am I at now? Well, this post is meant as a prequel, so at the time I agreed to this, I was a 3dan on Tenhou, with 255/1200 rank points after a losing streak. My R was at 1596. I can't count my score if it's below mangan. I riichi nearly any hand that isn't a tanki or riichi-only with a bad wait. I love kuitan. I've never considered a kabe. I've got a long way to go.

Maybe I should introduce myself, since this is the first post. My name is Amber, and I go by Erzzy in most places online. I'm (at the time of writing this) a 24-year-old girl from Canada, who got into the game, as many did, through Saki. I've been playing Riichi with my coworkers (who I taught) since February of 2019. I started playing seriously on Tenhou in March of 2019.

Let's put the numbers aside, look at my gameplay, and pick out a couple mistakes. Here's the last game I played before this all started: http://tenhou.net/0/?log=2019050521gm-0089-0000-e51a5d8f&tw=2

The first mistake is visible in the first hand. After discarding 0s and 0p, I clearly had no course but to fully fold. The 9m is not a safe tile, and it even connects to the dora, 7m. The best discard would be the 1s, which is suji of the 4s. The 8s is also suji of the 5s, but you can't have a closed wait on the 1s. I can also see three 1s, so it would need to be a tanki wait for the 1s to deal in. I know all of this, but in the game, I discarded 9m. Leveraging my knowledge consistently is a big problem for me.

Here's another mistake, in efficiency instead of defence. I'm not sure why I discarded the 8m. The only reasoning I can possibly think is that, since 9m would make me furiten if I went for kuitan, I wanted the 57m shape which doesn't accept 9m. I planned on a dora tanki, so the 9p would come out soon, which nets tanyao with a 6p draw.

But, that's ridiculous. There's no easy way to get kuitan with this hand. Calling just slows it down. Plus, the 78m shape can let me get a sanshoku of 678 or 789 if one of the other groups shifts. Or even pinfu, if I draw the 4s. This discard just reduces both my efficiency and my value.

Another possibility is that maybe the 5m seemed scary to me, since it's a middle tile. But, for now I've been following the "ignore open hands unless they are obviously mangan" mentality, so by that, I should ignore any scary feelings. (Obviously, this will be refined later, but it's a start.) I wonder if only being able to see five of the eleven dora makes it worth being scared...

Those are two big, obvious, fundamental mistakes. I should know better -- and do know better -- but don't show that knowledge consistently throughout my games. Of course, there's also a lot of minor mistakes to clean up, and a ton of stuff I don't know or think about. You can see a ton of errors in that replay. But, I hope to clean up the major ones first.

Before this journey started, I'd been focusing on trying to build higher value hands and calling less. My call rate hovers around 43-44%, but it's been going down... then again, so has my win rate. Hmm.

With this six-month intensive boot camp, I hope to gain the capability to reach Houou, if not reach it outright. Is that crazy? I don't think it's too crazy. It's nearly 700 hours of focused practice. But, the only way to find out is to do it!